Just past midnight we boarded our flight to Argentina, a quick 3 hours in the dead of night. Thankfully i was able to take one of my 1000 naps of the day.
We landed in Mendoza at 6am and after breezing through the Argentinian border, we were able to find all of our bags had safely arrived too. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case for our one of our fellow travel companions who will be doing this expedition with us, having lost a bag and being unable to communicate with the luggage attendant, I ended up being thrown in the deep end and had to act as translator to get everything Ironed out.
After a 20 mins drive the the hotel, having arrived so early we were unable to check in and had to wait for our guide, which arrived an hour or 2 later . When he did arrive he gave us a briefing on the equipment we would need and how the next few days would go, as well as an overview of the trip up the mountain which would start on Tuesday.
For lunch, this being the day of the world cup final France vs Argentina, we decided to find a local bar to eat and watch the game, and ended up finding english pub where we ate some empanadas whilst watching the first half where France was getting destroyed. It was quite fun to see how excited the Argentinians were and how much cheering they were doing, especially since the TV we were watching it had a 5 second delay, so we would hear the goal before we could see it.
Unfortunately for Argentinians the mood shifted to a much more stressful one when France scored 2 back to back goals, made worst by the fact that our tv was no longer displaying the match correctly. We decided to move to a bigger bar where people were crowding the outside streets to watch the TV through the bar window from the terrace to watch the extra time, which was as dramatic with loud cheers when they scored for their 3rd time and sudden quiet when France equalled out. However that was not to last as they wont the penalties and erupted in cheers and screams we could hear across the city.
Following this eventful match (where mathieu had to exhibit amazing self control and not cheer for France) we went back to the hotel and checked in, getting our stuff ready for the next day, where we will be moving to our first camp.
For dinner we decided to walk to a local steak restaurant where we had a really good Steak and wine close to the hotel, but ate so much food we rushed straight back to the hotel to go into a food coma, and recover from the last 48 hours of minimal sleeping.